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Though old, this remains a good overview. It will make a lot of people angry, because it skewers a lot of pet theories that allow people not to think too hard and thus remain cynically passive, but it’s largely accurate within my understanding.
I especially recommend at least reading myths 1-3, which are pervasive, misleading, and just flat-out wrong:
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/14/18093732/israel-palestine-misconceptions
Those who’ve follow my posts on the topic will recognize my one big quibble: Fisher sometimes uses the “a nation is a person” metaphor, as if an entire group or an entire side is a single entity with a single mind.
Trying to understand the conflict in terms of nations muddles things. Especially right now, I think it’s at least as illuminating to view the opposing sides as peacemakers vs surpemacists, rather than Palestinians vs Israelis.
(Working out that critique of the nation-as-person metaphor a bit: “What does Israel want?,” for example, is not a meaningful question. There are many people in Israel, all of whom are individual beings possessing separate minds. Israel, a political entity, does not “want.” People do. The more meaningful forms of that question are things like “What is prevailing opinion within the group?” or “What unites this faction?” More here: https://www.arieverhagen.nl/files/George-Lakoff-1991-Metaphor-and-War.pdf)
My first semester of college, I took a class called The History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict from the formidable Dina Legall. It was a remarkable class. I wonder how she’s doing.
She repeatedly emphasized points similar to the Vox article above:
This is a conflict about land, not religion. (Religion is a catalyst, not an underlying cause.)
It is a modern conflict with modern origins. (These groups haven’t been “fighting forever.”)
The other large-scale impression I took from her class…
…is that any attempt to use history to parse out who •really• owns the land, or which entire nation is the bad guys here, rapidly descends into nonsense. That is a fool’s errand.
This land was shared by many groups for centuries. Much of that time they shared it peacefully. There are many valid overlapping land claims. Colonial powers variously promised everything to everyone after WWI. History doesn’t offer answers to questions of what is fair and good here. Instead…
…if we want to ask question about what is fair and what is good, we can stick with the basics:
What are the conditions under which people live?
Do they have a home? Do they feel safe there?
Do they have self-determination?
Do they have peace?
Can they thrive?
These are the questions.
(To be clear, my words here, not Legall’s; don’t want to put words in her mouth:)
It is not the purpose of history to parse out which nation •deserves• to suffer. History is not an excuse for us to abandon our moral lens. History does not absolve current atrocities by any party, ever.
History does help us understand where we might find a path to peace, if we are willing to work for it.
Looking back on that class, I realize many of my fellow students who were either Jewish or of Arab descent were probably wondering, without quite being willing to ask out loud, “Are we the good guys here?”
History won’t answer that for you.
But here’s a Paul answer, fwiw: if you’re working for peace, you’re the good guys.
That’s not a question that one can ask of a whole nation. It’s a question every individual person must ask of themselves.